VaccZine #11: Interview w/ Cathexis
An Evening Redness, Corpsegrinder, Effluence. Vault: F
Cathexis's Untethered Abyss. Great album. Yep, the Austin, Texas, death metal quintet really nailed that one, I say now, almost a year later.
Riiight. It took me way too long to figure out that Untethered Abyss banged. My bad. And I’m not just flying that "my bad" as a personal apology. Nope, it's a big ol' I-suck-at-my-job professional whoopsie. So naturally, as I'm the universe's foremost anxiety generator, I've been thinking about that "my bad" a lot.
In February, I used Untethered Abyss's centerpiece, the slomo crusher "Library of Babel," as a frame to explore the history and potential viability of "technical doom metal." Great track. Good frame. Was the essay good? Well, I goofed by not namechecking Ehnahre or Vargr.1 Otherwise, I think it's an OK piece, and the interviews from Cathexis's Ian Bishop and Monochromatic Residua's Aaron Myers-Brooks are highlights.
Ah, but there were anxieties bubbling below the surface. One thing that was on my mind but I didn't dare mention in that piece was, at that point, Untethered Abyss had already been out on the streets for about eight months. Speaking strictly from a blog-wrangler perspective, especially one who curates a “best new metal songs” column, an eight-month-old album isn't a great news hook. Considering how fast music moves these days, it's like writing a birth announcement for your grandfather. Granted, I'm admittedly pretty bad at fulfilling my blog-wrangling obligations, as evidenced by the fact that I've written about, like, fishing.2 So, that I was just back on my bullshit and covering something that most would consider out of scope wasn't that notable. Still, it gnawed at me. Writing about an album that was too old to be called new and too young to receive a retrospective felt like I was violating some unspoken rule governing coverage in this era of "best new metal" lists.
I had my reasons. Untethered Abyss grew on me big time during those eight months. When I first heard it, I thought Cathexis was a solid if unremarkable entry in an expanding substyle of tech/prog death. Kinda Sunless, kinda Teeth, kinda Flourishing, that kinda thing. It took me a long time to really hear it, though.
Once I gave Untethered Abyss the time it deserved, it clicked. Ian Bishop's multifaceted vocals grew on me. Drummer Felix Garza III's all-over jazzy fills grew on me. Oscar Martinez's rattling yet stealthily nimble bass lines grew on me. Sam Kang and Chris Hillam's entwined twin guitar attack panned to either speaker grew on me. Now I think Untethered Abyss is one of the better albums of 2021. And, because I somehow failed my way3 into having a platform, I felt like I had to atone for "my bad" by letting people know about it. So I wheeled Cathexis into the column using "technical doom metal" as a hand cart.
I'm glad I had the chance to right my wrong, but it also makes me think of all of the meh albums I've mistakenly deep-sixed that are actually great and needed more time to bloom. It doesn't seem fair to me to shed albums like an Akita does fur in the summer because these albums don't fit the column's one-month timeline.
That's kind of where I'm at with music criticism these days. Not every album is a one-listen, first-blush good. Some are five listeners. 10 listeners. Perhaps many more. Some are mood-dependent, time-of-day-dependent, and location-dependent. Some require you to clear life hurdles: breakups, midlife crises, deaths, etc. Some need you to hear other albums first. Some just need space. You hear 'em, assess 'em, and stick 'em on a shelf. Then you come back eight months later, and you're like, "Oh, my bad, this whips ass."
For me, giving Untethered Abyss space was the key. When I came back to it, it allowed me to hear it on its own terms instead of rushing to categorize it. Like, after a single spin, I didn't get that Cathexis has a gods-of-yore approach to riffs, allowing the band to construct rippers that feel more Gorguts, Immolation, and Nile than its peers. I also didn't get that its greatest skill is synthesizing those ideas into supremely hooky tracks that are undeniably tech but sound uncluttered. Untethered Abyss clocks in at an extremely tight 31:28. Lean as hell. It doesn't feel like a second is wasted. Initially, that was its undoing. I couldn't sink my teeth into anything because Cathexis was always on to the next thing. But, once I took a breather and slogged my way through some needlessly epic and bloated releases, I sure appreciated Untethered Abyss a whole lot more.
"Best new metal" lists...are tricky. I like having the gig, the opportunity to pitch cool music to people receptive to cool music. It's really all I've ever wanted. I've spent my whole life preparing to be a record store manager much to the detriment of my general employability and non-existent retirement prospects, so once that line of work went poof, this was the next best thing. That said, a lot of elements of the list-making process...make me feel weird.
In the mainstream, the odd Undeath writeup aside, metal is covered mainly by lists. This has caused shifts in how its sold and consumed, some subtle, some not.4 For instance, most lists have punted on criticism, preferring to stick to what's good instead of covering any bad. I remember sneaking an Enslaved hatchet job into the column a few years ago, and the tonal whiplash was deadly.5 I haven't done it since. You either have pull-quote-ready praise for something…or you shut your damn mouth. To that end, it's fair to presume that a reader might think that albums are bad by omission.
This is, obviously, not great because a monthly column's space considerations and time crunch means I'm going to miss a lot no matter what. A list's calculus tends to boil down to this: A May-released album is either one of the 10-best released albums in May, or I miss the chance to cover it forever. That's...not how music appreciation works. And whenever an album clicks with me way too late, the anxiety generator in my soul spits out an imaginary catastrophe. "Wolf, you idiot, what if you failed to inform someone about their favorite album of all time and now they're stuck listening to Ghost???" OH NO. People-pleasing FOMO!
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. What if I whiff on a grower? The grower is a staple of the music nerd experience. I didn't like x, but then I listened to x a lot and learned to embrace it. If you're of a certain age, you remember all kinds of grower scenarios.
Ah hell, this song on the radio again?
Ah hell, the tape got stuck in the tape deck.
Ah hell, this album sucks and I've already blown my lawnmowing money.
As you can infer, those scenarios are older than dirt, like something Job would endure before God sent a gator the size of a Buick to bite his wife's butt off. Do growers even happen anymore? Does anyone have time anymore?
Tending a grower requires time. You got to put in the reps, the spins. Who has more than a few replays now? There's an endless amount of new music released every day. Every album ever recorded is also jockeying for your attention. Whenever I immediately replay something intentionally, it's an event, a thing I text to friends. You'll never believe this. I listened to that album...again...ON PURPOSE. If I want to feel like I'm keeping up with contemporary music to be good at my job, I can't take my foot off the gas. There is rarely time for spinbacks.6 Either an album connects immediately or it gets junked.
If you feel like you've been adrift in a sea of mids, this is why. Music is better now than it ever has been, it's just that it's damn hard to find the time to elevate decent albums beyond first impressions. I can't overstate this: The one-listen timeline doesn't work for every album. I know this. And yet, I'll still cruise into the AOTY discussion thinking that there have been a ton of good albums but few great ones. This sucks!
This sucks. I've grown to hate how I'm covering metal now, that anything older than a month, or whatever unit of measurement a blog denotes as "fresh," is radioactive until it has its 10th birthday. Until then, it might as well have disappeared, like when a cat pushes her kibble to the side of the bowl.
Be that as it may, I have to acknowledge there are good reasons supporting staying timely. There's a lot of money tied up in PR campaigns that help drive preorders that in turn drive label plans and touring decisions. Me flubbing coverage for a record and then realizing that I'm a slow-witted idiot eight months later doesn't really help any of that, even if I eventually make amends and that makes me feel better.
Still, considering the San Junipero living graveyards that are streaming platforms are here to stay, rendering ideas about scarcity and obscurity to the history books alongside Furbies and bleedings, I think it's worth challenging timeliness. We don't have to be so hopelessly beholden to schedules. If the music is still there, and the music is good, why not cover it? I think admitting that an album grew on you is an even stronger endorsement than recognizing its greatness in the moment.
Sooo, here's Cathexis again with the transcript of my emailer with Ian Bishop that led to February's column.
What got you into metal and what do you love about it?
I think everyone in the band got into metal differently. I personally grew up as a '70s prog rock fan. Growing up, I ventured into bands like Tool and Opeth as they were bands heavily endorsed by the prog scene of the mid-aughts. Ironically enough, I became more passionate about heavy metal during the height of the post-metal/sludge days, listening to Isis, Cult of Luna, and early records by The Ocean. It wasn't until I met the other members of Cathexis that I really started my journey into death metal.
However, explaining my love for extreme metal will always be a challenge. I just love the intensity, the musical virtuosity, the songwriting, the aggression! Yet, there are boundless words I can use to describe my deep passion for all things heavy music.
What are your foundational albums and how do those albums shape you creatively?
Speaking for Cathexis, I'd say Epitaph by Necrophagist, Decapitated's Nihility, Coroner's Mental Vortex, and everything Defeated Sanity has done. However, we would be the first to admit that Gorguts's From Wisdom to Hate is collectively our favorite record and our biggest inspiration to make our own death metal. The quality of riffs and extreme attention to songwriting are feats yet to be topped in our opinions. Me personally? The aforementioned albums, but throw in some classic Yes, some Gentle Giant,7 and some TULL, and you have a good idea of what I like. The obligatory shout-out to Nile has to be mentioned, of course!
How did Cathexis come together?
Cathexis started with Sam, Chris, and me in 2011-2012. Funnily enough, we were all high school buddies who started the band after we graduated, and I had already gone to college in a different state. The three of us were just extremely compelled to make our own music, and in the few opportunities I had to go home during school, we would write. Sam and Chris were already very accomplished guitar players; I was lucky enough to get along with them and fake my way doing death metal vocals until I got the hang of it. We played our first show in 2015 and brought on Oscar and Felix in the last few years. Their addition has been a perfect complement to the culture and musical progression of the band, and we've been extremely happy as a unit ever since.
One of the things that popped out to me in the PR copy for Untethered Abyss is the length of the composition process: six years. Mind walking me through how you wrote this album over that timeframe?
The short answer is that we're unbelievably slow writers. The long answer is that we're slow writers and overly picky about what we consider a complete song. Couple those factors with varying personal issues and a global pandemic, and there you have it. We had actually finished Untethered Abyss's production in February of 2020. But due to COVID, we decided to wait until 2021 to get a proper release with Willowtip, the label we had dreamed of working with since we first began the group.
As far as writing goes, Chris is the main cook, but we all work in the kitchen. A writing session usually involves Chris and I staring at Pro Tools for several hours and painstakingly working and re-working how a riff fits into an idea until we're exhausted...or too much beer has been consumed. Then, once we have a song ready, we shoot the idea to the rest of the band and jam over it until we have all made the parts our own.
So, "Library of Babel." First, what inspired you to drop the tempo on this track compared to the rest of the album?
We've been saying we want to write our "Clouded" for years. We love when a band can slow it down! In the 2020s, we almost see it as a virtue that we push ourselves to make very fast, technical music and songs at a much slower tempo while still achieving that intensity that we listen to death metal for. At this point, "Library of Babel" is one of our favorites to play live, and I cannot see a future where Cathexis drops an album without a slow song or two to mix it up.
For that track in particular, what were your influences?
The aforementioned "Clouded" without a doubt. Our buddies in Baring Teeth (check them out!) do a superb job of making slow death metal as well. Seeing a smaller dissonant band pull it off so boldly on all their records was a big influence for us. Other influences include Cannibal Corpse's "Scourge of Iron," and we even specifically pulled a trick from Nile's "Eat of the Dead" on this song.
I guess this is inside baseball, but I'm curious: You're panning the guitars left and right throughout "Library of Babel," but the solo is in the dead center. Was there any reason for that from, like, a conceptual standpoint?
I can't speak for Sam and Chris too much. I can say that the focus was to get extremely tight performances and do as little studio post-op as possible. Centering the solo while keeping both guitars riffing was just our attempt at keeping the listening experience consistent. Solos are something we will likely always keep in short supply. We would rather use them to embellish the song's overall feel instead of obstructing the recording or the composition to show off our chops.
What's one thing people should listen for in "Library of Babel" they might miss?
Great question! Two answers. First is right when Chris starts his solo, Oscar does a bass swoop while Felix hits a fill. All three things coming together make for one of those "music magic" moments that you can't recreate. It's such an amazing, transcendent moment on the album that I can't help but feel amazing pride in! Second, during the writing process, I kept pestering Chris to put a slow section in a slow song. This sentiment was 100 percent derived from when Nile slows it down in "Eat of the Dead" (around 2:48). Sure enough, Chris was able to make it happen! So that slowdown around 3:38 of "Library" directly results from my love of Nile and their penchant for making slow, heavy metal.
Is there a reason that, for the most part, technical doom/sludge isn't a thing?
On the face of it, technical doom is kind of an oxymoron. What makes a lot of "tech death" technical is not just the complexity of the riffs but the speed they're played at. The combination of the two brings that intensity to this music we have all come to love.
As far as this particular style goes, it's definitely very niche, and we have to continue making more of it and at a high quality for this style to pick up steam. Most pre-existing fans of technical and brutal death metal simply aren't as privy to hearing slow songs. Even in my own circles, some people love super brutal or extreme music but don't really see the point when it comes to doom metal or sludge. To an extent, it kind of makes sense. No one is listening to Disgorge or Archspire for their lack of intensity or bigger, more expansive moments. They hardly have any of those moments because the bands themselves don't really do them and may not be interested.
We just love slow, heavy music, and I'm sure some fans out there may find Library our most boring or monotonous song on the album. That's okay, though! We love making songs like "Library," but we also love making songs like "Mortuus in Perpetuum." The goal is and will always be to make an album that we as a band can call complete and whole.
Doom, and slowed-down metal as a whole, is a collective favorite genre of the band. Whether it's the epicness of Candlemass or the filth of Primitive Man, slow, heavy metal is part of the Cathexis DNA, and we don't really discriminate between the genres. There's just something about an overly distorted guitar playing at glacial speeds that venerates that feeling of awe, and it's a shame some people don't get it. I bet those people haven't heard Dopethrone either, though…
Given your success with this song, I suppose I couldn't convince y'all to start a technical doom band, right?
You 100 percent could! Send me some ideas, let's get crackin'!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cathexis’s Untethered Abyss is out now via Willowtip Records.
NEW ARRIVALS
SPOTLIGHT
An Evening Redness - An Evening Redness (Transylvanian Tapes)
An Evening Redness, Brandon Elkins's self-titled debut under this moniker, is a six-song novel. "I wanted to make music that sounds like how Blood Meridian reads," Elkins said in a pre-release promo one-sheet via Earsplit PR, namechecking Cormac McCarthy's 1985 book that gave An Evening Redness its name. "Lonely, high plains insanity, sudden bursts of violence, longing melodies, ambient isolation."
Elkins went deeper in a subsequent PR transmission:
When I was 11 or 12, I flew to Arizona to live with my grandmother for a month. We drove from Sierra Vista northwest through all the major sights of the state: the Sonoran Desert, the Petrified Forest, up trails through mountains and down rock flume water slides in canyons. Up through Tucson and Phoenix, across vast stretches of desert and mountains that my little Midwestern-born mind could barely comprehend, finally landing at the Grand Canyon. To say that sense of awe and isolation is something I chased throughout the production of this album is an understatement. The land, the stories, and the violence perpetrated within as described by McCarthy in Blood Meridian have tangled up in my memory of the desert sun and dust and landed us here, together, treading in disorientation over frozen peaks and crusted, dried-up lake beds.
Blood Meridian tangled up in memories. A land of multitudes and long stretches of nothing. The suffocating expanse of infinite possibilities and inescapable ends. The desert, for a lot of people. For me? Well...
Disclosure: I live in the desert. There's a dang Joshua tree in my front yard that skeets a ton of seed pods every year that never seem to sprout. I've hiked purple mountain majesties, almost fallen into abandoned mines, sat by hot springs that look like mirages until you splash water on your face...and spent three goddamn hours in line at the DMV. I drive through stunning, wide-open vistas to go to the bank. I've become accustomed to sunsets so vivid that someone would call you a hack if you painted them. The town where I work is a sky-for-miles ruralized suburbia with unnaturally green lawns that abut streets named after people who, through systematic and brutal submission, extermination, and assimilation, were forced from these lands.
That is to say, I don't see the desert like a lot of non-resident artists see the desert. The magic has been diminished and normalized by society's extraneous, notional demands. I get that there's something otherwordly about it compared to the concrete penitentiary of the city, but where newly sunburned rest-stoppers see a lawless, wild-westy frontier, I see...my job...and the grocery store...and a bunch of tumbleweeds that I'll have to pick out of my fence whenever the afternoon wind whips up. This is my desert, tangled up in my day-to-day reality. Like, the music of my desert isn't a wind chime tuned to "Amazing Grace" or Bono hornily howling about going there with you, but a haggard bar band stumbling through an Ugly Kid Joe cover. I know. I live here.
Now, I don't have anything against art aiming to capture some idealized vision of the desert, imbuing it with an otherness that contrasts their experiences.8 And, again, it's not like my story features any enduring truth or even extends to anyone else who lives here, past or present. It's a speck of sand in an hourglass that holds millions of years. That's it. It's my experience, though, and it shapes how I interpret media about this place. How could it not? And mostly, it makes me want the desert curious to show me they know anything about the desert that isn't what people who don't live here know about it.
Anyway, obviously, based on where this is placed in the newsletter, you can intuit that I think An Evening Redness shows me some things. It does, but not in a way I expected.9 I think it shows me how stories add layers to the landscape. What makes An Evening Redness interesting to me is how it scratches those layers off.
Elkins is also the brain behind Auditor10 and Iron Forest, two noisy projects rich with evocative timbres, and is joined in this endeavor by singer Bridget Bellavia (Piggy Black Cross), session drummer Ryan Jewell, and guest shredder Brendan Sloan (Convulsing, Altars). All involved ensure An Evening Redness isn't a predictable windblown, Earth-y drawl. Instead, these six songs are like someone asked Angelo Badalamenti to score Red Dead Redemption 2, or if Pink Floyd circa Meddle signed on to a Spaghetti Western and couldn't shake night terrors for the entire session. It's a trip, and I mean that in every possible sense.
That's not to say the elements An Evening Redness are playing with are new. Sure, there are some Hollywood-y affectations, the sounds that anyone exposed to western culture might think hang in the "Southwest" air: spectral pedal steel, screaming harmonicas, floating Morricone choruses. However, when An Evening Redness leans into these tropes, they feel purposeful. They're not the accordion-drenched cue of a lazy movie setting up a scene in Paris. No, it's what Maggie Mae Fish noted in a recent two-part video essay on Twin Peaks's connection to soap operas.11 It's a commentary on the media that surrounds and informs it. An Evening Redness leans so hard into these tropes that they topple over. The twist is what remains: a dose of reality, making the rote story beats feel surreal.
This amplification and weirdification of well-worn cues transform An Evening Redness into something else, a subversion of expectations. It reminds me of walking through a dried riverbed, not really paying attention, and coming face-to-face with a rattlesnake. Like, oh yeah, this place can kill me and sunbake my bloated body until it bursts even though I'm still a dove's flight away from Walmart. The hidden reality is always poised to puncture the story.
The two-song stretch that exemplifies this best kicks off with album highlight "Pariah," a moody doozy of a haunting ballad. Bellavia is an absolute star on this one, oozing charisma and total control. However, what makes the vocal great is what made Linda Ronstadt great: how the edges of Bellavia's voice seem to fray with pain. It's a quality that ripples throughout the entirety of the track, this unnerving reality creeping just beyond the campfire light. Jewell's drumming pulses with laid-back but still antsy energy, an almost imperceptibly off-kilter rhythm, the ever-so-slight warning that you might be tumbling into mania. Elkins's wobbly synths sound like coyotes' cries echoing through a mescaline haze.
Not so much in sound but in spirit, "Pariah" reminds me of Songs: Ohia's masterpiece Ghost Tropic, a midnight incantation cracked by hidden frailties. It also reminds me of a desert-dweller's right of passage: staring at a night sky that's a literal universe, worlds upon worlds, and wondering why the hell you picked to live in this lonely, dusty hellhole where everything is harder than it needs to be.
"Pariah" is followed by "Black Flame at the Edge of the Desert." It feints like it's going in the same direction, leaving you on a melancholic note, that nagging feeling of loss when you've seen the wrong side of a sunset/sunrise. But then it gets dangerous. Distorted guitars drone violently. Jewell pounds. Bellavia yells until her voice is swallowed up by the din. It's like how a wildfire seems to move with a purpose and terrifying intelligence, consuming everything and sending it straight to hell. It's "Pariah"'s opposite, but one couldn't happen without the other. Both explore a desert quality most ignore: how quickly everything can go sideways.
For everything that works, like Brendan Sloan's soloing, there's stuff that doesn't. "Winter, 1847," goes from harrowing bleakness to a '90s RPG encounter or a particularly avant-garde NFL Films bed. Still, it provides a narrative throughline that more droney albums need, pushing you through many scenes instead of focusing on one. That's kind of the thing: Even though it looks like it's eternally on pause, the desert is always moving. Ask the ants that have tunneled through the concrete slabs in my driveway or the vinegaroon that scampered across my office floor. What ultimately makes An Evening Redness compelling is that it doesn't just consider life but its opposite. More often than not, the music matches Stephen Wilson's art, a stunning landscape with a wayward animal stuck in the middle of it that probably doesn't even know that it's already dead.
HIGHLIGHTS
Adrian Cappelletti - Vitiating (self-released)
Australian metalhead Adrian Cappelletti's résumé is already rich with credits, the kind of "oh, you've done that" connections that usually line the IMDBs of beloved character actors. The one that most people will know is as the bassist on Disentomb's The Decaying Light, the Australian brutal death metal band's 2019 breakout.12 On the other hand, degenerates such as I recognize Cappelletti as the everything-but-the-drums half of Lurid Panacea, one of the finest grinders currently in operation.
Of course, these two links are only scratching the surface of a burgeoning career. Cappelletti played drums on Rawhead's Spineless Pigs, one of the best modern goregrind albums.13 He also mixed and mastered that record, two duties he's performed as Inurn Productions for a ton of other bangers: Ecchymosis, Found Hanging, Putrescent Seepage, etc. My favorite bit on his Metallum page, though, is an aces inside joke if you listened to grind in the '00s. Gather close, kids, and let me tell you about a band named Fuck... I'm Dead. Punchline: Cappelletti is the drummer for Shit! I'm Alive? That's the kind of long-term booking only metal can deliver.
This is all to say that Cappelletti is a talented metal lifer who knows the secret ingredients that give solid brutal and/or extreme metal records life. Vitiating, a three-song instrumental solo outing released quietly last December, has a lot of lives. Each section feels like it's bursting with a career's worth of widdles, like how a Charlie Parker solo contains wormholes that lead to alternate dimensions where that bite-sized run becomes a big bang that births a universe. Not surprisingly, my first listen was overwhelming. There's so much here. Vitiating has more notes than my ex watching me fold laundry.
For example, take "Mesial," the longest song of the three, clocking in at 3:42. I count 25 distinct sections. Naturally, how one demarcates these things will always be subjective depending on one's feel for intra-section gear shifts. But yeah: 25. Some stoner doom bands have sustained 10-album discographies based on one. Here's Cappelletti casually burning through a whole notebook full of riffs for the enjoyment of whoever happens to wander by his Bandcamp.
While Vitiating is a lot, like peeking into the three-espressos-deep brain of Muhammed Suiçmez circa 1999, the deeper you dig into "Mesial" and the other two tracks, the more you appreciate Cappelletti's attention to flow. Check out how the riff at :24, a brief foreshadowing of shred to come, finally pays off at 2:41. That's not a recall so much as it's the third act of a story. Once I picked up on that narrative thrust, I realized just how detailed these songs are, how every section sets up the next one. The flow is incredible. Many shredder albums, particularly of the tech death persuasion, often feel deeply disjointed, like you're sitting through a slideshow of someone's shredder vacation. Vitiating is a Robert Caro biography.
So, what's up with Vitiating? Why is it sitting on Cappelletti's odds and sods Bandcamp page that's, otherwise, "unfinished/unreleased" demos? Sometimes I get the feeling that this is a proof of concept for a future project that will only use a quarter of the material. While it's far more cohesive than it has any right/need to be, it does exude a beat tape vibe; Disentomb-type beats, that kind of thing. I've also thought of Vitiating as, like, a tech metal take on Chopin's Études. If there ever was a tech metal conservatory, couldn't you imagine kids having to sweat through "Sunder" on graduation day like it's "Giant Steps" or something?
A clue to Vitiating's purpose might exist in the notes of Cappelletti's latest upload, a take on Paroxysm Unit's "IKU Runner":
Colin Marston stole my job! Haha... in all seriousness, this was what I had written for the talents' Konstantin Korolev' (7H Target etc) and 'Vladislav Vorozhtsov' (Relics of Humanity etc) before I got the news of someone completing the songs before I had enough time on my hands to do so.
That someone was Colin. Being the insane prolific that he is, he won the 'race' hence that is what came to be "Paroxysm Unit" as you know today, which he's done an awesome job of.
Colin Marston is taking our jeeeeerrrrrrbs.
Anyway, if Vitiating is just some stuff Cappelletti had lying around, sketches for a band that doesn't yet or will never exist, that's even more remarkable. Because if these are the leftovers worthy of banishing to a Bandcamp that only 10 others have found, imagine the résumé credits to come.
Avmakt - Demo 2021 (self-released)
This Norwegian trio is an all-star group if you're prone to thinking that bands like the related Abhorration, which I covered in VaccZine #9, are full of stars. Like those thrashers, Avmakt's constellation is ridiculous: Black Magic, Black Viper, Condor, Dødskvad, Flight, Gouge, Obliteration, Saprophage, etc. However, the most pertinent connection might be Sadhak, the solo doom project of vocalist/bassist Andreas Hagen. Though Avmakt's debut demo is mean-ass black metal, staking out that first- and second-wave tweener space when morbid thrash was still a stable element, it dares to doom.
Let's start off with the rippage. You saw the connections, that Avmakt rips shouldn't be a surprise. Guitarist Christoffer Bråthen has a knack for hacking your face off in a way that sticks in your head. The best stuff recalls the snarling gnarliness of Darkthrone's great riff on Celtic Frost, Sardonic Wrath.14 Simple, straightforward, swings like a sledgehammer. But, really, the reason Demo 2021 works is because Bråthen can play, which, I hate to say it, makes a world of difference in the blackened arts.
Drummer Kristian Valbo can also play, nailing the requisite blasts, but with a great feel for doing the most with less. Compared to many blackened busybodies, Avmakt's mid-paced sections are pretty spartan. The space, though, makes you feel like you're in the room, as if you can almost see Valbo smacking the hell out of the snares while constructing ample pockets. It's clever stuff, a trick that well-traveled musicians figure out.
This approach functions especially well within the confines of the production, which is right on the borderline of too-necro and analog warmth. It sometimes sounds like all three musicians are broadcasting from different ice cream trucks towards a centrally located tape deck, so if anyone did too much it would flood the dynamics. Again, though, Avmakt makes this work for it. Fittingly, Demo 2021 sounds better on worse equipment. It leaps out of my phone speakers.
But don't go running for the aux cord of your tinniest clock radio. Hagen's bass ties everything together. The way the bass, freeing itself from the groove and exploring the edges, makes the doomy sections seemingly levitate is worth the price of admission. So, yeah, let's talk about the doom. "Soulclad Assassin," this set's highlight, opens with a morose riff getting torn apart by slow speeds. It reminds me of Abandon, the severely underappreciated Swedish sludge/doom band that I won't shut up about.15 It just rules. And it makes the faster stuff sound all the better because you know Avmakt has another gear. The invigorating part is that you don't know which is coming next.
Demo 2021 downsides? Well, I would've liked some more expressive, live-wire solos. What Bråthen brings to the table is fine, but something noisier a la Joe Aversario would've put this over the top. Still, Avmakt does what it needs to do, stating its purpose while setting the table for a promising career. Of course, with prolific players, there's always a worry this is a one-and-done. That "Relics of the Will" ends abruptly like someone popped the tape before the feedback could ring out seems...cruelly cosmic if that's the last we hear of the band. Hopefully, the stars align once more.
Corpsegrinder - Corpsegrinder (Perseverance Media Group)
I'm not sure I'd call Corpsegrinder's Corpsegrinder "good." It is, in fact, powerfully stupid. But powerfully stupid is still powerful, and what is powerful in metal is good. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, Corpsegrinder, not to be confused with the eight other Corpsegrinders, of which George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher was only briefly in one, and that one isn't this one. Confused? Yeah, me too, which is ironic in the '10,000 spoons' sense since this isn't music to be confused about.
Corpsegrinder's logline is "what if Corpsegrinder growled for Hatebreed." That's it. Sure, I could slice the meat more finely. I could say the game plan for each of these ten tracks is:
Chug out some simple death metal
Build to a big, chuggy toughguy riff
Tighten the bow with some more simple death metal
But let's get real. It's Hatebreed. It's straight-up post-Rise of Brutality Hatebreed.16 The riffs are Hatebreed. The song structures are Hatebreed. Even the way that Corpsegrinder approaches some of the cadences is Hatebreed. If you wish Hatebreed were more Tampa death metal instead of Slayer, here's your goddamn album.
That makes sense given who is involved. Cannibal Corpse's best frontman is backed on this one by the Bellmore boys, whose previous metal credits are the last Dee Snider album and Kingdom of Sorrow, the Jamey Jasta/Kirk Windstein collabo. Surprise! Corpsegrinder reminds me of the latter. Where Kingdom of Sorrow was sludge Hatebreed, Corpsegrinder is death metal Hatebreed. And lo, who is twiddling the knobs in a co-producer role? It's Jasta.17 It's also out on Jasta's label, Perseverance Media Group.
It would shock me if Jasta didn't have writing credits on Corpsegrinder. Take "Bottom Dweller." The album highlight is Gallery of Suicide-era Cannibal Corpse dressed in a Hatebreed basketball jersey. It thuds and tumbles around. Fisher's indestructible vocals roar on top of it. There you go. It's stupid music for these stupid times, but it just works, tickling the part of your amygdala stimulated by thudding and tumbling things. That said, how did an album this stupid miss out on the trifecta? It could've nailed it with a Massacre cover, even. But accusing this of a lack of forethought is beside the point, right?
Right, if there's one thing that murders this album dead, it's thinking about it. Corpsegrinder is meant to be background music, the thudding and tumbling thing that floods your ears loudly as you deadlift. Once you start digging into the composition, it's over because the songs often feel like mashups instead of actual songs, like Dangermouse trying to fit 100 Demons into Malevolent Creation.
The death metal just isn't that convincing. "Acid Vat" is as good as the actual death metal gets, and that's because Erik Rutan guests on it. The rest is proximity death metal. "Crimson Proof," the requisite burner, even sounds kind of nu metal, like a cast-off from Primitive-era Soulfly. So, because this is a death metal/hardcore record, and the death metal is subpar, the hardcore stuff needs to pull more weight to achieve a good balance. This is an ultimately futile endeavor. That Corpsegrinder punches above its weight, hitting Born From Pain's level of big chungus riffs, is plenty impressive, but Corpsegrinder was never going to be prime Hatebreed, was it? Nah. So, it’s not good. But does it need to be? Well, depends on the type of power you’re interested in harnessing, I guess. Fun record, still in the rotation. Take that for what it's worth.
Effluence/Blowtorch - Split (self-released)
Psychocephalic Spawning demonstrated that Effluence's extremely hard bop was essentially boundaryless, a head-pulping pulp adventure that pulled back the veils of reality and presented you with a strange planet populated by belching elder gods that also honk on many saxophones like Rahsaan Roland Kirk while tossing lightning bolts of guitar widdles at one another during bacchanalian frenzies so moist it would make Mount Olympus residents blush.
Lone brutalizer Matt's first salvo in 2022 isn't a repeat, happily confining itself to the puddle underneath an autopsy table. Indeed, these eight tracks plow into the heart of hyper turbo ping territory and go as balls out as possible. Effluence's side of this split with Blowtorch18 clocks in at 13 minutes. Shorter than a DMT trip, about the same amount of brain matter splatter. Longest song? Two clock in at an expansive 1:48.
I don't mean "expansive" just as a joke. Even though these free BDM explosions are brief blast fests, they still go places, proving that the micro is as interesting as Psychocephalic Spawning's macro. "Antibiological Mucus" is almost like the median Effluence track, which is hell of a thing to write because, my god, it is a hell of a thing. It opens with a clatter that sounds like Disgorge and Disgorge (Mex) jousting. Then, quick shred section. Then, the drumkit falls down a flight of stairs. Then, John Zorn crashes through the wall like Steven Tyler into Run DMC's practice space. Then, a blown-off-its-tits-on-Ambien sleepwalking Defeated Sanity falls into a china shop. Then, your neighbor completes the Lament Configuration. Then, everyone returns for the grand finale which sounds like the lost footage for Event Horizon must've looked. The aristocrats!
Want to keep up with what I think is good this year? Follow my lists on RateYourMusic: 2020, 2021, 2022.
FROM THE VAULTS
F - Coldeäccol (1991)
First, the name. When it released this brain-blower-upper in 1991, this Finnish trio wasn't operating under F. No, that name would come later at the behest of a label that must've thought, in a leap of logic similar to optimistically swiping right on a convicted serial killer, it had a unit-pusher on its hands and the only thing getting in the way of a platinum plaque was the nom de blargh.
So, what was the name that Jukka Sillanpää (bass, vox, guitars, synths), Jussi Saivo (guitars, vox), and Kusti (drums) printed on its second demo Coldeäccol? Are you ready?
Funcunt. Here's its logo:
Yeahhh.
Now, in the interest of historical accuracy, I guess I should call a Funcunt a Funcunt. This being Substack, I'm sure an army of Bari Weiss supporters armed with torches made from copies of Fahrenheit 451 liberated from liberal libraries will sniff me out and charge me with crimes of wokeness for choosing F instead. And, since I was once a UK citizen, I suppose I have the right to unleash a casual c-bomb per that half of my latent cultural identity. But, whew doggies, I'm going to abstain because:
I probably need to look for a job later this year, and unless some supremely chill HR person who is into obscure European prog death is handling the hiring, I don't need "Funcunt" surfacing in my search results.
It's a dumb name.
It's a dumb name! I deal with dumb names as a professional hazard daily, but Funcunt is up there. Like, was it adopted solely to filter out weaklings? The music does that just fine by itself. Because, whew doggies, Coldeäccol is weird.
Comprised of two 10-plus-minute tracks, Funcunt sounds like Voivod or Coroner...if Voivod or Coroner lost their minds in solitary confinement. Opener "Teesit englannsiski muunsi" starts out totally like you'd expect a prog death album to start...with faux-tribal rhythms that jump-cut to chanting. Not even a minute in, I can already sense that anyone once involved in Aquarius Records must be in a bidding war to secure F's reissue rights.
The metal soon follows and the metal is good, a circular, herky-jerky riff that feels like something Denis "Piggy" D'Amour left in a locker over summer break. The neat thing is how bass-forward some of the sections are. Think Mordred or Atheist, that sproingy, low-end hop-scotching ahead and leading the melody. It gives the riffs more wiggle without sounding like the thinking-man-with-a-boner wobble of a bad fretless Steve DiGiorgio impression.
Is any of this weird yet? No? How about a big death chug backed by synth-y strangeness? A mouth harp? A cold-blows-the-wind dirge that's like Godspeed You! Black Emperor scoring a Bergman flick? A flower-withering My Dying Bride weeper? Really, none of that is weird to you in the context of a prog death song? Oh, OK, I got it: At 6:55, someone fills the negative space of a false stop with a damn clown horn. Squeaky, squeaky, your dog just lost its mind. If that doesn't grab you, "Mikko Mattila," the next song, has a section that sounds like a drunk college band bumbling through "Tequila."
Here's the thing: You'd tolerate none of that if the metal wasn't good. "Teesit englannsiski muunsi" closes with a riff that bounces between an Ambexian journey into the Earth's crust and Edge of Sanity's later explorations of space. The way it carries you along is not something a shitpost band would be capable of. And, really, who else at the time was capable of this?
Check the year again: 1991. What other weirdo death metal albums escaped from the lab this early? To my ear, F's closest comps are Carbonized, Disharmonic Orchestra, and Pan.Thy.Monium, and none of them were as bugfuck in 1991. They'd get there in a hurry, but F's shrooms kicked in just a bit earlier.
So, what influenced F? Mr. Bungle? Spazztic Blurr? O.L.D.? I mean, even if we look outside of metal: ...RIO? ...Zoogz Rift? ...Zappa? Like, I know we've been living in the shadow of Crotchduster's Big Fat Box of Shit19 for almost 20 years, so the idea of a genre-jumping avant-garde death metal record isn't that wildest thing anymore, but how did these Finns get here in 1991?
These Finns would stick around for two more releases. The first prompted the name change: A split with Brazil's Bewitched released by Warmaster Records.20 1993's I-III, F's lone full-length out on Ei Enää, followed soon after. It's objectively better than Coldeäccol, more fully realized, bursting with confidence as the players become more skilled as musicians and composers. But it lacks the idiotic force of Funcunt's thrashier stuff that makes Coldeäccol so engaging.
After F wrapped, Jukka Sillanpää had a metal career, landing in bands like Lavra and As Divine Grace. Thanks to Sillanpää's YouTube channel, you can hear remasters of the extended discography. And please, do listen. You'll be part of an exclusive club. At the time I'm writing this, the remastered version of Coldeäccol only has 827 views, which seems cruel for how ahead of the curve it seems to be. Like, did anyone hear this at the time? Did it influence anyone? I think it influenced at least one.
Near the end of 2021, Helvetic's Inverted Invalid Invasion popped up in my Bandcamp feed. It's from Finland. It's a trio. It plays deathly thrash weirdness. Here are the liner notes running down the players:
Leif & Lars Graaknajaax Luciferian – Four fingered oralist and spatial war, space glue dealer buster & spastik and elastik fantastik
Hank Horatio Übersyndrome Helvetic – Six strings + six strings + additional six strings, medium of Ektog-Ra, some rare instruments like child femur flute, kinderbong and reptile skin ballsack drums
Arthur ”The Ship's Godlike Medic” Müller – Drums and whatnot, bongos and dingodongos on Blackhole Kongo
Now, I'm not saying Helvetic, a death metal band unmoored from genres that has a bizarre backstory and reptile skin ballsack drums, is F. Given this is Finland, it's probably Circle. But, whew doggies, it is weird. I'm glad this one isn't named Funcunt.
BUT I GOT ONE THING LEFT TO SAY
Holy god. As you can tell from the timeliness of some of this material, this is the newsletter the Fates didn't want you to read. Data loss disasters, power outages, and enough Sturm und Drang in my personal life to make me feel like I accidentally read from the Necronomicon while trying to make a coffee order.
Podcast update: We're attempting to get back on track. Setback: The last two pods we recorded have serious sound issues. I don't know what to do about it. I might try to salvage the good parts and stitch together a bonus pod. If you've been wondering where the pod has been, all I can say is, "Hey, me too." In the words of Meshuggah, not dead, not alive.
I've optimistically opened up two more sections on the Substack. The first one is Random Band of the Day. If you follow me on Twitter, you know the deal. I click the "Random Band" button on Encyclopaedia Metallum and write about whatever comes up. There are stats, it's nerdy, it's extremely me. Those posts will launch soon-ish. The second is Plague Rages Stacks, where I'll freshen up some older essays salvaged from dead blogs. The first post is up now, a piece about Manowar that hasn't...exactly...endeared me to the fanbase. If you want any of that junk in your inbox, you'll need to subscribe to them separately. I don’t auto-enroll anyone into my bullshit. Give me a damn award, GDPR.
Substack let me have footnotes, which seems like a mistake.21
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Vargr's The Abduction, a three-song EP featuring big Steeve (RIP) of Gorguts and Negativa, is a great what-if. Cut in '98, and then…sits on a shelf until 2019. The riffs are great. The vocals are not. What if this band had better vox? Decades later, time for round two. Apparently, Stéphane Bélanger has reactivated the band, staffing the project with a lot of Obliveon. Another bite of the apple.
The best thing I ever did as a writer was sneaking the phrase "animatronic ejaculate" into BrooklynVegan. That's also up for grabs as a band name if you want it.
I can't stress this enough: I'm only here because I fucked up my life so badly I can't do anything else. Zero talent, all privilege. Filing stuff only somewhat late and being able to eat a lot of shit will keep you in the game for a long time.
This is an intro for another time, but I have noticed that albums cynically created to alleviate blog-fatigue — that being something intentionally engineered to be outsider-y and quirky that stands in stark opposition to whatever the predominate vibe of the moment might be — have gained an even bigger foothold in the list era.
I respect Enslaved immensely. I haven't liked an album since Isa.
This changes as soon as I decide to cover an album. The listening threshold is five listens, but I tend to play albums a lot more. I also need to hear them through different equipment and during different times of the day. Like, I need to hear the same album while I'm working and I need to hear it with the lights off 'round midnight. It's the only way I can trigger ideas. It's a weird process, but it's mine. I can detail this sometime if you want.
Gentle Giant is my favorite band. This pleases me.
The inverse is similarly irksome. A couple times a decade, something newsworthy will happen around these parts, and a reporter will jet in, embed themselves for a few days, call this place a dump and the people they meet idiots, and never follow up after filing something superficial. My favorite of these napalm-to-nuance takes was when someone wrote that the area smelled like "burning tires" and "wouldn’t embarrass the word 'shithole.'" This appeared in the profile of a baseball player. All right, thanks for coming! Drive safe!
I don't want to say that it's meta because that word has metastasized into something else. I should also note that I'm interpreting it through my own lens and not the clearly stated influences of the artists.
I like Auditor quite a bit. Reminds me a bit of my main ambient/drone/noise squeeze Kevin Drumm.
Maggie Mae Fish is a huge influence on my writing, as I'm sure you can tell.
I'm in the minority, but I think Disentomb's early stuff is great, particularly its work with New Standard Elite.
The top 10 goregrind albums released after 2010 is probably an intro. Remind me.
In the commentary track to Sardonic Wrath, Fenriz was pretty damn pleased with "Alle Gegen Alle." I agree. It's my favorite Darkthrone song.
Going on nearly 20 years of fruitlessly recommending In Reality We Suffer.
Rise is the last Hatebreed album I like. "Doomsayer" forever.
I should note that Jasta has actually been in the death metal game for years, releasing Evilution's Shrine of Desecration in 1997 on Pure Death Records, so it's not like this is totally out of left field. If Jasta is reading this, hey, reissue the Evilution album.
Blowtorch side: Not good.
As my bud Chris would say, if you can remember any lyric from this album, you're cancelled.
Really, Warmaster Records got cold feet over Funcunt.
A big one!